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Many of America’s heroes never live to tell their story, but Philip Strachan did. Strachan is a former member of the infantry who was issued The Bronze Star in the Gulf War which took place from 1990-1991. The Bronze Star is awarded to a member of the United States Armed Forces for heroic achievement in a combat zone.
Strachan, 50, grew up in Boston and joined the army in 1987. He did his basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia. Right after boot camp, he was sent to a small farming town relatively close to Frankfurt, Germany. He happened to be in Germany at the time when the Berlin Wall fell, on November 9, 1989.
It was around this time that Saddam Hussein, the former president of Iraq, began his invasion into Kuwait. Strachan was deployed to Saudi Arabia right before Thanksgiving. He was the squad leader of the only infantry unit in the platoon that drove bradlees into the middle of the desert.
Strachan’s platoon remained in the desert for some time. He said, “We were in the Northern part of Saudi Arabia, not by Kuwait, we were just under Iraq’s border. We didn’t go through Kuwait. Kuwait was just a fake. The marines who went into Kuwait, that was to make them think we were coming in that way. What we did was, we came around with a left hook and we caught them off guard in the middle. It was almost just like target practice when we got there. They didn’t see us coming and like I said, a few people did get hurt.”
Strachan said they were stationed in Saudi Arabia because the country was scared that Hussein was going to take over. He received a medal from Saudi Arabia following the Gulf War called the Kuwait Liberation Medal. It is in the image below, to the left of the bronze star.
According to Strachan, “The war was only for three days. We were the furthest people up in Iraq, at the time, and we were just South of Bahrain. That was when General ‘Stormin’ Norman’ (Norman Schwarzkopf) signed the peace accords. And he made the mistake of allowing the Iraqis to use small helicopters. It was a big mistake because that is when they started gassing their own people, by using those helicopters.”
The first night of battle, said Strachan, “It’s like 4th of July times fifty because we have weapons just lighting up the sky, everywhere around you is just blowing up. You got these cobra helicopters coming, looking mean as s*** and you look at them and you say, 'Jesus I hope they know I am on their side,' because they look very menacing. I remember I was listening to ‘Symphony for the Devil’ the first night on my headphones and thinking ‘Hmmm…this is pretty appropriate.’”
His platoon was out with the scouts and the tanks, as he says, “Doing most of the work. Blowing s*** up.” The American tanks would be shooting the Iraqi tanks and they wouldn’t just shoot them once and continue on, they would shoot them three or four times until they blew up.
He said, “If it didn’t blow up, it wasn’t dead.”
Then one of the scout platoons went down after their bradlee was shot. It came over Strachan’s radio and no one in his platoon wanted to go to the site because it was too far ahead of their vehicle.
Strachan decided to go anyway and took his squad to the flaming bradlee. People were running around, jumping in and out of the vehicle. He pulled people out of the vehicle, some were dead and others, he saved. Strachan then called in for a med vac to take the wounded to the hospital.
When he returned to Germany, Strachan’s Colonel awarded him with the Bronze Star and he was also issued a CIV, a Combat Infantry Badge, that he says, “Is more important to me, actually, than the Bronze Star.”
He remains humble, however, “The only time I really tell anybody I have the Bronze Star is only if it will give me an advantage, like going to Emerson. It wasn’t an honor to me, it was something that happened, and it wasn’t a good thing, so I don’t look at it as an honor.”
